The Personal Playbook

If you want to work on a car, whether to fix, improve, or modify it, you don’t just pop open the hood on the highway and start throwing parts inside. Even if the parts you have are fantastic! You have to get the car somewhere conducive to the activity, like a garage. You have to run proper diagnostics; very importantly, you need to have a good general understanding of how cars work, and what you’d like to be different about this one. You have to have a safe place to take test drives. You can have the best components in the world, but if you don’t do these things, you can’t work on your car.

Working on yourself is no different. You can get fantastic advice, read incredible books, and even absorb daily personal improvement blog posts from incredibly handsome bloggers – none of it will do you any good if you’re just throwing this stuff at your brain while you’re moving around.

Let’s say you read a book about how to be a better parent. That’s awesome! But… what kind of parent are you now? Do you have any idea? Do you have your own “parenting playbook” documented somewhere, with notes or, at least (pardon the pun), crib sheets?

If that book has a nugget of wisdom about a parenting technique, how are you installing that behavior in your personal engine? How are you comparing it to what you already do and deciding which parts need improvement and which don’t? Do you have a safe place to test these new techniques and then re-run the diagnostic? Do you know to do that – one at a time – or do you just try to do everything you read in that book all at once and then revert back entirely in three weeks, all of it forgotten?

The next time you’re about to read something that tells you “How to Get Better at X,” stop. Before you read it, open up a document somewhere and write down how you currently do X. Call this document your “Personal Playbook” and write down your process. Understand it. Decide what you’d like to improve, and why. Then go read the “How to Get Better at X” article, armed with that context.

Did you decide that something in that article was worth trying? Maybe it was “Seven Steps to Improve How You Talk to Your Kid.” Well, push back the idea that you can try all seven steps at once. Pick one. Say, “I’m going to try this for one month.” Write down what you hope will happen. Write it down, I said. Then don’t try to improve or change anything else for a month.

At the end of the month, evaluate. Did you get what you were hoping for? If you did, then awesome! Change your Personal Playbook to reflect the new technique. Then, pick another item – or a new topic. If you didn’t, reflect – maybe you should try it again, but not every piece of advice works for every person. Try a different one, commit for a month, and repeat.

Rinse and repeat. Improve one thing at a time, in a safe “testing environment,” and then work it into an actual playbook of your best habits. Otherwise, you’re just throwing carburetors at a running engine and hoping something improves.